FreeNas

[noobftw]

Could some nice person let me know if these parts will work with FreeNAS OS? Thanks in advance.

 

 

MSI X470 GAMING PLUS

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

 

 

[Lenovo1984]

Yes, they'll work with FreeNAS. Why would you want something that fancy as a NAS though?

[noobftw]

I got given the hardware by a family friend and just wanted to make use of it. I already have a main computer system and i don't really want to sell the hardware. 

 

Also am I right in thinking version 11.1 has a hypervisor included so VM's are possible. Hopefully Get a bit of a homeland on the go.

[Lenovo1984]

2 minutes ago, noobftw said:

I got given the hardware by a family friend and just wanted to make use of it.

That new of a system for free? Why not put it to use with Windows as a spare gaming rig?

[noobftw]

yo

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, noobftw said:

I got given the hardware by a family friend and just wanted to make use of it. I already have a main computer system and i don't really want to sell the hardware. 

 

Also am I right in thinking version 11.1 has a hypervisor included so VM's are possible. Hopefully Get a bit of a homeland on the go.

Id probably use proxmox then. That way you get the same zfs filesystem, and you also get much better vm support with proxmox to use the cpu power.

[jde3]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably use proxmox then. That way you get the same zfs filesystem, and you also get much better vm support with proxmox to use the cpu power.

How is it much better? You lose the ability to use jails and jails will always out preform VM's.

 

Example, I have 4 jails running on a system using 256MB of ram. Will Linux even load in 64MB of ram? Maybe? ?How much is left for applications?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, jde3 said:

How is it much better? You lose the ability to use jails and jails will always out preform VM's.

but you can't do things like run anouther os in a jail, and freebsd isn't that supported. You can't do things like run win server in a jail.

 

Speed wise kvm is normally 2-3% impact, pretty small.

 

And for vms proxmox is so much better. KVM is supported much more, you get better clustering support, you get pcie and usb passthough, you get memory ballooning, backup and restore is better.

 

You really seem to love freenas

[jde3]

I don't use FreeNAS, never have. I don't think it's bad but I've never used it personally.

 

I don't like VM's at all. If you have the ability to avoid them, do so. It's a failure by the IT community to visualize computing environments. The mistake was made in the 90's and we still live with it today. It is a crude way of punching out virtual OS environments. It's a huge waste of resources.FreeBSD can run windows server btw in bhyve. (if you ever wanted to do such a horrible thing)

 

Also FreeBSD isn't that supported.. by what? At the server level there isn't much Linux can do that FreeBSD can't and.. that plays both ways. (PF, DTrace, kqueue, vnet, ports, jails, libressl etc)

 

At one time I may have agreed with you that Linux was a better server OS but.. I don't see any reason to use CentOS as opposed to FreeBSD anymore.. CentOS just doesn't offer anything appealing. My opinion of course, you can use whatever and life will progress just fine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, jde3 said:

I don't like VM's at all. If you have the ability to avoid them, do so.

The nice thing for vms for me is how it separates the hardware and the os. That way I can upgrade all my servers and never have any down time with live migration. It also allows you to have one system kill a vm and not kill the host. Yea containers can do this do a point, but there is less separation and you stuck with the same os and kernel version. 

 

As for FreeBSD vs linux, use what works best, but linux has much better support, by the community and other users and things like gpus. Nvidia doesn't have drivers for freeBSD, so there goes lots of deep learning. I don't need to do more Freebsd by self. 

[jde3]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Nvidia doesn't have drivers for freeBSD, so there goes lots of deep learning.

https://www.geforce.com/drivers

Sure they do. Select FreeBSD from the OS list.
 

Quote

 

FreeBSD Display Driver – x64

Version: 396.18 - BETA

Release Date: Tue Apr 10, 2018

 

not that that's terribly important to servers but sure.. deep learning.

 

You can also make jails portable (it's just a zfs dataset afterall) and fallover and reboot them just like a vm. From their perspective they are full isolated systems. They smell and look pretty much like the real thing with possibly some serious limitations on security like root being unable to write to / or /bin or /etc because that isn't what you want to allow it to do. Since it sits on the host and is filesystem is not wrapped in a vdev or zvol it can still be updated when it's in that state. That way the jailed daemons can't change their own binaries or configuration even if they obtain root, they can only work with the data they are allowed to work with. There are larger management solutions as well for cluster systems with bhyve and jails under cbsd (basically a management framework of scripts using puppet, it allows console VNC over http and everything you'd expect) You also can just use regular tools like top to get per-jail per-process information so you can view your cpu and ram usage across your entire host with all virtual os's included. That means you don't need to add per VM monitoring and reporting software, all that can be done on the host.

 

I get that for a lot of people "fixing linux" involves googling the error clicking on the first link and pasting whatever commands you find into a terminal but that isn't really a great way to be. Sure the info is out there but is it the right info for you and your situation? The problem with Linux now is the same problem it's always had and that's the fragmentation of the distros and so many different people pulling it in so many different directions. It just might not ever get better and we may have jumped the shark here because... when you are doing simple things the adhoc throw things at the wall development model works fine, but solutions to really hard computing problems have to be designed and engineered they take careful implementation across the entire system and that is where freebsd's model is better. I hope that is not true, I want Linux to shine but currently things are looking a little rough and ragged.

 

Funny story.. VMWare offered me a very nice contract at one time.. I turned it down because I didn't want to move. I know VM's very well.. I just think it's the wrong way to do stuff.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, jde3 said:

You can also make jails portable (it's just a zfs dataset afterall) and fallover and reboot them just like a vm.

You don't have to reboot the VM when moving it between hosts, that's why it's often called Live Migration (vMotion for the VMware fans out there).

 

And since you bring up the look at the whole solution issue VMs still address this better than Jails and Containers do for large complex networks with complex network segmentation with failover between datacenters and disaster recovery tool sets. VMs are also far more widely supported with backup software solutions and VMs are also much more portable across hardware, when you do hit limitations with that all that is required is to turn the VM off before moving it (but you should never need to).

 

VMware you can set cluster level CPU feature restriction so all hosts present identical CPU features to the VM allowing live VM migration between hosts without a shutdown across different generations of hardware.

 

For some of the often pointed at draw backs of VMs like resource overhead much of that has been mitigated for a very long time, like with ESXi where host tracks similar memory areas and combines them in to a shared memory pool so the more VMs on the host the greater the efficiency you actually get in the reduction of overhead. Same story for storage, use deduplication and thin provisioning and it really won't matter much how many OS disks you have stored since they are all 90%+ the same.

 

One thing Jails and Containers do better is CPU scheduling. Hypervisors have very little information on what the VM is doing and how it is using it's CPU resources so contention is by far the biggest factor you have to think about for host density, having more cores doesn't really solve it either. Jail host on the other hand do have that extra oversight and knowledge on what is going on up and down the entire stack so less guess work is involved by the host.

 

With Commvault I can backup over 1000 VMs in around 20-30 minutes utilizing Intellisnap to quiesce all the hosted operating systems, create an array level snapshot (Nutanix and Netapp for us), have that storage snapshot replicated to another datacenter, mount that snapshot to another vSphere cluster using VMware SRM (or even Commvault), bring up all the VMs in an isolated bubble along side other already running VMs and have a replica of the original datacenter running live with zero modification to the VMs, the hosted OS, no conflicts between the very same VMs and OS systems running in the original datacetner all done with standard features of the products involved without having to dive head long in to custom solutions that never get documented well and are never well understood by anyone other than the person who created it. With this we can test DR and all hosted applications and know it's going to work before the real thing is required and we do all the above just not in a isolated bubble.

 

Without being as familiar with Jails as I am with VMs my judgement on what I do know is the above would be very much harder, nowhere near as well proven or supportable (by any experienced engineer) and may not actually be possible at all.

 

VMs solve more real world design problems than Jails do, thing is not everyone needs to solve those problems. You can pick and choose what you want to use but where I work I can confidently say Jails are not a workable solution.

[jde3]

VMWare has some nifty stuff with it's virtual datacenter products. I used them maybe 10 years ago.

 

It's just tooling however and of course FreeBSD dosen't have a company the size of VMWare to create such type of tooling. (Although they do have Joyent who is working on some BSD stuff) You also don't need to send trucks of money to them to use it.

 

VM's are still not the best solution from a technical aspect. If we pretend that none of this existed and you had these problems.. would emulating hardware be your first choice as a solution? God no.. the people that had this right were Sun who during the dot.com era would sell you a monster E10K where you could punch out segments of the system into virtual servers. The dot.com mania made people very scared to take that approach again.. but.. it was the right approach. It solves the problem in the cleanest possible way. Now rock forward to today and what we are dealing with are apps that are so large now they consume the entire system, or they consume the system and use a collection of parts that they essentially need the entire thing.. but.. they are just apps and should be treated as such, not as independent servers. There is no reason to have thousands of kernels running when you look at the size of the software stack your using as opposed to what you need it's nothing but bloat. There isn't a better word for it.. and we all know bloat sucks.

 

Sure people have been doing it the wrong way for a long time and they have built a great number of tools around that to ease the pain and mask the issues.. but it's still at it's fundamental core the wrong approach. This is something we as a community can fix.

 

You should look into it @leadeater it could save your company tons of money. Maybe switching your contract from VMWare to Joyent would be a good thing. (Joyent hosts Twitter)

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, jde3 said:

You should look into it @leadeater it could save your company tons of money. Maybe switching your contract from VMWare to Joyent would be a good thing. (Joyent hosts Twitter)

No it wouldn't save us any money because the cost of VMware is not that much and the added staffing cost to support such an infrastructure would be significantly more than what we pay VMware. Joynet doesn't help solve any of the infrastructure design and technical requirements, Joynet or more correctly the collection of tools it gathers is the stack level above which we are already doing (other than KVM and we already do use that). We have continuous integration and completely automated software build and deployment and that sits on top of what the team I am in is responsible for.

 

Some companies are simple, they do one core thing and can focus on that one thing we unfortunately are not one of those. Anyone that says we can save money by doing something, buying their product, use this software without looking at our current environment gets shown the door. We've been down this road before multiple times and it never stacks up.

 

The only people that have come in with a compelling proposition is Nectar cloud who target one specific area and look to solve actual business issues not insignificant technical issues like the difference between a VM and a Jail. Nectar cloud is just OpenStack and Ceph, but it's not just that they are just tools. Nectar cloud is a funded service where they maintain all the Puppet resources and the entire OpenStack environment for you and they provide an entire collection of ready to run OpenStack resources for researches to use and researchers can contribute in to the platform for anyone to use as well. Not once was saving money ever mentioned, it will but that's not really that important.

 

If all you are doing is trying to solve a tool problem rather than a business requirement then you are doing it wrong. It doesn't really matter how awesome or better a tool is than another if it doesn't address a need it's not better.

 

5 hours ago, jde3 said:

If we pretend that none of this existed and you had these problems.. would emulating hardware be your first choice as a solution? God no..

Well actually yes, because it solves the issue of moving hosted resources, VMs, to disparate non similar hardware. Nothing but VMs currently solve this.

[jde3]

24 minutes ago, leadeater said:

No it wouldn't save us any money because the cost of VMware is not that much and the added staffing cost to support such an infrastructure would be significantly more than what we pay VMware. Joynet doesn't help solve any of the infrastructure design and technical requirements, Joynet or more correctly the collection of tools it gathers is the stack level above which we are already doing (other than KVM and we already do use that). We have continuous integration and completely automated software build and deployment and that sits on top of what the team I am in is responsible for.

 

Some companies are simple, they do one core thing and can focus on that one thing we unfortunately are not one of those. Anyone that says we can save money by doing something, buying their product, use this software without looking at our current environment gets shown the door. We've been down this road before multiple times and it never stacks up.

 

The only people that have come in with a compelling proposition is Nectar cloud who target one specific area and look to solve actual business issues not insignificant technical issues like the difference between a VM and a Jail. Nectar cloud is just OpenStack and Ceph, but it's not just that they are just tools. Nectar cloud is a funded service where they maintain all the Puppet resources and the entire OpenStack environment for you and they provide an entire collection of ready to run OpenStack resources for researches to use and researchers can contribute in to the platform for anyone to use as well. Not once was saving money ever mentioned, it will but that's not really that important.

 

If all you are doing is trying to solve a tool problem rather than a business requirement then you are doing it wrong. It wasn't really matter how awesome or better a tool is than another if it doesn't address a need it's not better.

 

Well actually yes, because it solves the issue of moving hosted resources, VMs, to disparate non similar hardware. Nothing but VMs currently solve this.

You can never improve if your just going to throw you hands up and say "We must be doing it the best way it can be done." Common man.. Sysadmins have a lust for efficiency and resources aren't free. If you have a thousand VM's you got a hell of a lot of slack there.

 

For me, I'd get the job at your company, tell them they could save money, then happy be show the door to go look for someone that will improve the filth they are currently sitting in.

[aezakmi]

On 10/05/2018 at 6:04 PM, Lenovo1984 said:

Yes, they'll work with FreeNAS. Why would you want something that fancy as a NAS though?

just here to post this

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, jde3 said:

You can never improve if your just going to throw you hands up and say "We must be doing it the best way it can be done." Common man.. Sysadmins have a lust for efficiency and resources aren't free. If you have a thousand VM's you got a hell of a lot of slack there.

That's not what I'm doing, we evaluate all the time. Just telling me about a tool doesn't help at all especially when most of the stuff it does or is supposed to help with we already do. Like I mentioned unless you actually know our environment very little advice can actually be given on improvements. Tools are just tools, if they don't align with business requirements they have no value.

 

Neither did I say we are doing it the best way, we aren't servicing our researchers properly hence we are looking at Nectar cloud.

 

Don't give me opinions with no substance, this is why we show time wasters the door because they only waste our time. I'm not saying you are wasting my time in the same sense but don't just go here is a tool and it will save us money when you can't make that judgement with the near zero information you have.

 

As for your opinion on VMs that just your opinion on them, what you currently advocate for has it's own technical limitations. Also we don't have a particular preference for VMs either, if it can be done as a Container then we'll do that.

 

You can shout we're all doing it wrong as much as you like but like Icarus don't fly too close to the sun.

 

Quote

Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when the wax in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea where he drowned, sparking the idiom "don't fly too close to the sun".

 

This tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaëthon.

 

 

[Jarsky]

Damn I will feel like we should be using jails now, when this is only 1 of 15 stacks that I manage.....if only it were that simple 

 

[jde3]

@Jarsky Total madness. I'm so glad I no longer do that kind of work. That's a shitload of bloat man.. how do I best say "You could run a nice small company off the resources you waste" .. idk so I'll just say that.

 

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

That's not what I'm doing, we evaluate all the time. Just telling me about a tool doesn't help at all especially when most of the stuff it does or is supposed to help with we already do. Like I mentioned unless you actually know our environment very little advice can actually be given on improvements. Tools are just tools, if they don't align with business requirements they have no value.

Your totally right here. We might have a miscommunication. Text is an awful format to talk in. +1 ... yeah.... I'm just really glad I left big IT. I want to be able to fix things. Thinking about 40k VM's grosses me out. no thanks.

 

I can't believe you actually quoted Icarus like as if I didn't know. heh.. well you never know I guess right? But no.. your still doing it wrong. You might be stuck doing it wrong, but its wrong.

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, jde3 said:

I can't believe you actually quoted Icarus like as if I didn't know. heh.. well you never know I guess right? But no.. your still doing it wrong. You might be stuck doing it wrong, but its wrong.

But how do you know you're doing it right 

[jde3]

Just now, leadeater said:

But how do you know you're doing it right 

Well.. you pretty much have a VM for every 2 people in New Zealand so.. ya.. pretty sure somethings wrong

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, jde3 said:

Well.. you pretty much have a VM for every 2 people in New Zealand so.. ya.. pretty sure somethings wrong

Well that math is wrong, but regardless of the number of VMs because that has no relation to whether or not a VM is the correct tool for the job. That was a philosophical question, how do you know you're doing it right. It's a good thing to think about, many people think they are right but could be wrong or the right thing changes over time.

[Blebekblebek]

Why no one pointing out the obvious.

AM4 platform isn't mature for freebsd, it may work, but expect lot's of problem.

 

Why not just use it for desktop/workstation? that's the greatest option available for AM4, and yet you want to run it as a NAS? what is your computer spek? i9?

[jde3]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well that math is wrong, but regardless of the number of VMs because that has no relation to whether or not a VM is the correct tool for the job. That was a philosophical question, how do you know you're doing it right. It's a good thing to think about, many people think they are right but could be wrong or the right thing changes over time.

No its a good question, I just wanted the joke.

 

I think that question could be solved but it'd take some work as a philosopher to figure it out. In the realm of IT it's often complicated so it would have to be broken up into smaller chunks. I wonder if anyone has done work on this question before?

 

What is truth? ..is often asked..

Am I solving a problem in a concise and efficient manner?  .not so often.

[Jarsky]

10 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

Why no one pointing out the obvious.

AM4 platform isn't mature for freebsd, it may work, but expect lot's of problem.

 

Why not just use it for desktop/workstation? that's the greatest option available for AM4, and yet you want to run it as a NAS? what is your computer spek? i9?

 

My new NAS is an AM4 (2700X on an X470). The only annoying thing about the platform is that any Ryzen 7 chips don't have integrated graphics so you have to use up one of the few PCI-E slots that are larger than X1